Department of English Professors and Graduate Students Present at the College of Liberal Arts Digital Storytelling Workshop

June 5, 2013

Dr. Sarah Arroyo and Dr. Carol Zitzer-Comfort of the Department of English presented at the College of Liberal Arts Digital Storytelling Workshop on Friday, April 12, 2013, with English graduate students Kiki Shaver and Cortney Kimoto. They explored ways to foster students’ collaboration, composition, and communication skills through digital narratives.

Dr. Carol Zitzer-Comfort discussed how she uses digital storytelling in her writing-intensive, children’s literature course and English 479: Louise Erdrich Seminar. She explained that the digital stories her students produce are literacy analyses that cannot be replicated in written text, and she provided notes on how to compose and assess digital stories. Dr. Zitzer-Comfort then introduced Kiki Shaver who composed a digital story in her English 479 seminar. Kiki shared her experiences making digital stories, reflecting on the learning curve inherent in video-editing software and the creative process of transforming textual analysis into multimodal performance.

Dr. Sarah Arroyo framed her discussion of video and participatory composition around theorist Gregory Ulmer’s concept of electracy: the apparatus emerging with our culture’s transition from print to electronic media. Cortney Kimoto briefly defined the characteristics of participatory culture and screened clips from her videos, Video Cultures: Image Activism (Enculturation, 2010) and Phoenix – Lisztomania – Long Beach/Bolsa Chica, CA Brat Pack Mashup. Dr. Arroyo concluded with her concept of “the idiocy of videocy,” which she then illustrated with a video that she and English graduate student Bahareh Alaei-Johnson created. Both Dr. Arroyo and Cortney illustrated how video, particularly video memes, often involve global collaboration, interaction, and communication, as well as influence participants’ text-based writing processes. All four presenters concluded the workshop by engaging in a lively Q&A session with the audience.

L-R: Dr. Sarah Arroyo and Cortney Kimoto

Photo by Walter Gajewski  

Written by Cortney Kimoto